Thick black carpet of oil greets Spanish king as fears grow over slicks from sunken tanker

There was no red carpet on the beach at Muxia yesterday for the visit of King Juan Carlos, but there was a black one. You might say a thick-pile.

It consisted of the foul-smelling, inches-deep sticky gloop that is the spilt fuel oil from the wrecked tanker Prestige, and the King of Spain could not avoid it getting on to the soles of his black loafers as he paid a solidarity visit to the oil-fouled north-west coast.

The beaches at Muxia, just north of Cape Finisterre in Galicia, have already been cleaned from an initial coating after the tanker's hull split more than a fortnight ago, and local people, fishermen especially, were despairing when another black tide washed ashore at the weekend, amid fears that more is on the way for the entire coastline.

Yesterday, teams of volunteer workers from all over Spain were shovelling the new slick into buckets as fast as it was beaching, their white overalls rapidly turning black with the filth. Nobody thought to give Juan Carlos protective clothing and the King seemed a slightly incongruous figure in his beautifully cut overcoat and grey trousers as he walked along the heavily polluted beach, giving his shoes the occasional glance.

But at least he was there. "He went down and got his feet dirty. The only way to resolve a problem is to be in the middle of it," said Daniel Castro, 46, a local fishing-boat skipper, one of the men whose livelihoods have been imperilled by the massive oil spill. "We're very grateful that he came to see the problem at first hand."

Arriving by helicopter, the King talked with residents and the local fishermen's association, then stood on the oiled beach and appealed for solidarity in tackling the deepening environmental crisis, telling locals: "We all have to help."

The King's visit yesterday contrasted with the absence of his Prime Minister. Some people in Galicia are not happy that Spain's premier, Jose Maria Aznar, has not visited the area and his government has to some extent played down what locals see as a catastrophe.

Mariano Rajoy, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was in Galicia to monitor the spill, expressed relief that the slick had not reached the rich fishing grounds of the Rias Baixas region a few miles to the south, an area of mussel beds and intensive fish farming that meets much of Spain's increased demand for seafood over the Christmas period.

He said a flotilla of five salvage vessels was working to vacuum up oil from the principal slick out at sea during the day, and confirmed that a French mini-submarine, the Nautile, was preparing to dive to the site where the Prestige broke in two and sank 130 miles offshore, to determine if it was continuing to leak fuel.

French environmental authorities and the Portuguese Navy said last week the Prestige was continuing to spill crude, although Madrid insists no fuel has leaked from the vessel since it went down on 19 November. Officials say about 60,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in the Prestige's tanks when it sank will have solidified under pressure on the seabed.

Mr Rajoy attributed surface slicks spotted over the site of the wreck to fuel and bilge oils from the tanker's own engines, and said he expected "news on the state of the fuel soon".

The 8m-long (26ft) Nautile arrived in the Galician port of Vigo on Sunday, and its three-man crew is due to make several inspection dives over the coming days, should conditions at sea allow.

BirdLife International now estimates that more than 15,000 birds have died because of the Prestige spill. Volunteers operating along Galician beaches may have found only a few hundred dead and dying birds so far but in such disasters only a minority of victims usually come ashore so the real total is bound to be considerably higher.

Michael Szabo, a spokesman at BirdLife's Cambridge headquarters, said: "Around 300 new birds have come ashore today and this indicates possibly thousands more are dying out to sea. It is very difficult to get an accurate picture as there are only 200 volunteers spread along 140 separate beaches along this coast and some places are inaccessible for safety reasons."

Meanwhile, there are growing fears that Iberia's small population of guillemots, the most southerly in Europe, will have been wiped out by the slicks. The total Iberian population of guillemot is 10 to 25 pairs with only two tiny colonies of five to 11 pairs in Spain, right in the area of Galicia affected by the oil spill – Vilano Cape and Sisargas Islands, on the Costa de la Muerte. Several have now been found dead.

"The Spanish population of guillemot has been hardest hit by the Prestige oil spill," said Alejandro Sanchez, director of the Spanish Ornithological Society. "We predict the guillemot is now very likely to become extinct as a breeding bird in Spain.

"If this happens, the Prestige oil spill will be remembered as a tragedy for Spain's wildlife as well as its people."